BURBANK, California -- Open the doors of Stage 22, off a narrow street on the Warner Bros. studio lot, and you've suddenly entered one of America's most widely recognizable yet rarely visited rooms, NASA's Mission Control in Houston.
It's the set of Clint Eastwood's latest film, the space shuttle action-adventure Space Cowboys.
The set, created by Oscar-winning production designer Henry Bumstead, is perfect down to the last details: a jar of candy here, coffee cups there. Over there, in front of the flight director's desk, a bouquet of white roses commemorates the astronauts lost in the 1986 Challenger disaster.
There's the 9-foot by 36-foot display screen at the front of the room: One-third of it is cluttered with shuttle telemetry, gibberish to anyone who doesn't speak the secret language of space. The middle screen displays the shuttle's orbit path.
The third screen provides the first clue that you are nowhere near Mission Control. There on the screen, projected at four times his normal size, is Eastwood dressed as a shuttle commander, his every twitch captured in crystal clear detail.
It's no accident that the set so faithfully reproduces the NASA control center, said Space Cowboy's video and computer graphics supervisor Liz Radley. "This is all exactly NASA's stuff. It's not guessed at. It's real. I spent two weeks in Houston to make sure."
Faced with the technical challenges of shooting scenes in Mission Control -- where Eastwood and the other astronauts, played by James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones, and Donald Sutherland, communicate with the ground crew via the giant video screen -- Radley used high definition television technology for the first time in a Hollywood feature.
Scenes shot on film are transferred to HDTV and projected on to the big screen.
"Normally, when you have graphics next to video like this it makes the video look soft," said Radley. "But this way everything is sharp. In fact, the detail is such that when we first started using it we found we had to improve parts of the set that looked bad."
Radley, who has done computer and video graphics on more than 30 feature films, including Men In Black, Batman and Robin, The Fugitive, and several Star Trek movies, was startled by the vast improvement of HDTV over standard NTSC video.
"When I first saw it, it was like the first time I got glasses as a kid and suddenly I could see the blackboard," said Radley.
Another difference is the use of on-screen language in the film. While many of the screens in the room are identical to the real Mission Control computers, during her two weeks in Houston, Radley said, "Everything that happens on the computers takes place in a language of acronyms that's totally indecipherable to an outsider."
For scenes where the action takes place on a computer screen, she explained, "We only have a few seconds to get a point across, so we took the look and feel [of] what they do there and made the acronyms into full words so they'd be more accessible to the audience."
On an adjacent sound stage computer playback operator Dan Dobson has prepared a life-sized model of the shuttle cockpit for several shots involving onboard computer screens. Clearly visible outside the shuttle windows are the bare walls and wires of the sound stage. Dobson explained that before they shoot, blue screens will be brought into place.
"We shoot with the blue screens everywhere and then ILM will do their magic and build outer space out there."
Nearby is another piece of space shuttle, gimbaled on a hydraulic lift. Though it will appear as an entire shuttle on screen, nowhere on the lot is there actually a complete shuttle mock up. Instead, it's shot in pieces, like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.
During her two weeks in Houston while researching Space Cowboys, Radley said she was tremendously impressed by the level of teamwork. "I was amazed. We're all used to the 'me-first' of Hollywood. But down there everyone realizes that they're part of something that's bigger than themselves and it really shows."
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Space Cowboys is slated for release in May 2000.
